Pittsburgh Penguins Lose Their Third Game Straight 5-2 Against the Florida Panthers, 2/14/2024

The Florida Panthers won their seventh in eight games in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, February 14th. Matthew Tkachuk had a goal and two assists in helping the Panthers achieve their 5-2 win. John Ludvig scored his first NHL goal for Pittsburgh.

Panthers lineup against the Penguins:

Verhaeghe – Barkov – Reinhart

Cousins – Bennett – Tkachuk

Luostarinen – Lundell – Rodrigues

Gadjovich – Stenlund – Lomberg

Forsling – Ekblad

Mikkola – Montour

Ekman-Larsson – Kulikov

Bobrovsky

Stolarz

Penguins lineup against the Panthers:

Guentzel – Crosby – Rust

Smith – Malkin – Puljujarvi

O’Connor – Eller – Rakell

Carter – White

Pettersson – Letang

Graves – Karlsson

Ludvig – Ruhwedel

Joseph

Jarry

Nedeljkovic

   The first period was completely scoreless… In the middle frame, it appeared that the Penguins scored – Rickard Rakell scored on the power play in the second period but the Panthers challenged it due to a high stick before the goal. Lars Eller played the puck with a high stick.

   Two goals being just 34 seconds apart, both Matthew Tkachuk and Jonah Gadjovich scored to give Florida a 2-0 lead. Tkachuk scored from the left face-off circle with a wrist shot off a pass from Evan Rodrigues… Gadjovich redirected a shot by Brandon Montour. Aaron Ekblad pushed it 3-0 on the power play with his third goal of the season. Ekblad struck from the right circle with a wrist shot. Getting the Panthers a 4-0 lead, Anton Lundell redirected Tkachuk’s pass from the left post. Bryan Rust scored the first goal for Pittsburgh after he deflected a spinning wrist shot coming through traffic by Jake Guentzel.

   Anton Lundell extended the Panthers’ lead to 5-1 in the third period. Lundell’s shot burst high into the air off Marcus Pettersson’s skate, and then landed behind Tristan Jarry and got in off his skate. At 13:53 of the final frame, John Ludvig struck his first NHL goal for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Ludvig scored from the right circle with a wrist shot… the score remained 5-2 through the remainder of the game.

Sidney Crosby on the Penguins’ 5-2 loss against the Florida Panthers: “It’s a big shift in momentum. That happens in games sometimes. You got to get by that and find a way to get it back,” – “Obviously, it’s not a big deal. You get one disallowed and then they score two… That’s probably not what you’re looking for but like I said, there’s a lot of time left to get back in the game and we weren’t able to do that.”

Tristan Jarry on the Penguins’ 5-2 loss: “Obviously, it’s tough. A couple of those haven’t gone our way and I think we just need to keep building momentum when things don’t go our way. I think that’s been a tough part of the year and then obviously with all the chances against and the grade A looks, it’s always tough,” – “We are good players. That’s something that we’ve talked about this year and I think we just have to play up to our standards. I think we haven’t done so yet and I think when we do, we have some really good games. We’re tough to play against, we put pucks on net, we’re driving the net, and we score goals. I think we just have to do more of that.”

Notes:

– Tristan Jarry made 18 saves for Pittsburgh

– The Penguins have lost three games straight

– Jake Guentzel missed some time at the end of the game for a possible upper-body injury.

– Matthew Tkachuk has 37 points in 21 games since December 23rd (13 goals, 24 assists)

– Matthew Tkachuk became the sixth player in Florida Panthers history with 20 three-point games. He now joins Aleksander Barkov (50 GP), Jonathan Huberdreau (49 GP), Olli Jokinen (29 GP), Pavel Bure (23 GP), and Stephen Weiss (22 GP).

– Evan Rodrigues hit 200 NHL points

– Anton Lundell scored twice, and Evan Rodrigues picked up two assists

– Sergei Bobrovsky made 25 saves for Florida